Just days after moving in, the doctor, his family and several acquaintances
were confronted by an angry white mob who gathered outside the house and
threw rocks, shattering windows. One of the terrified occupants fired
a rifle into the crowd, killing one man and injuring another.

What followed was two dramatic court cases involving legendary attorney
Clarence Darrow, cases that highlighted the early fight against housing
segregation, and the right of blacks to protect their property.

“When people discuss civil rights, they don’t talk much
about what happened in the North, and they don’t talk about what
was going on in the 1920s and 30s,” said Kevin
Boyle, author of the book and associate professor of history
at Ohio State.

“But the fight for civil rights went on in the North as well as
the South, and it runs across the 20th century. I wanted to explore a
civil rights case that doesn’t get much attention.”

Boyle, who is a native of Detroit, said this case gets some notice in
the Detroit area, but he wanted to bring it wider attention and explore
some of the wider ramifications of what happened back in 1925.

“It started out
as a local story, but the context was explosive. The NAACP and others
saw this case as symbolic of national issues.”

The story involves Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black physician who moved to Detroit
after growing up in Florida, graduating from Wilberforce University in
Xenia, Ohio and receiving his medical degree from Howard University in
Washington, D.C. He arrived in Detroit in 1921, married a woman named
Gladys Mitchell, and practiced medicine in a ghetto neighborhood named
Black Bottom.

But Sweet was a proud and ambitious man, Boyle said, and wanted to move
into a nicer home. That meant he would have to move to a white neighborhood.
He bought a home on Garland Avenue, and immediately got the attention
of the white residents.

Everyone, including Sweet, knew there was a potential for trouble. The
Detroit police stationed officers in front of Sweet’s bungalow when
he moved in. Still, Sweet was fearful and invited friends and acquaintances
to stay with his family the first few nights – and stocked the house
with several firearms.

On Sept. 9, 1925, Sweet’s worst fears were realized when several
hundred white residents gathered outside his house. At some point, people
in the mob began throwing rocks, shattering windows in the house. Several
shots were fired from the house, killing one man and wounding another.

Such violence was not unheard of when blacks moved into white neighborhoods
during this time period, Boyle said. But the NAACP in New York was looking
for a case that would allow them to highlight the threat of growing housing
segregation in northern American cities. They found that case in the story
of Dr. Ossian Sweet.

“It started out as a local story, but the context was explosive,”
Boyle said. “The NAACP and others saw this case as symbolic of national
issues.”

Because of the importance of the case, the NAACP was able to get Clarence
Darrow – just months after the famous Scopes monkey trial –
to defend Sweet and the 10 others who were in the house that night. The
first trial ended in a hung jury. In a second trial, the defendants were
acquitted.

While Sweet was victorious in court, any joy he felt was short-lived.
His wife died shortly afterwards of tuberculosis, which she may have contracted
while in jail. Sweet lived in his bungalow on Garland Avenue for more
than 20 years, until financial troubles forced him to move back to the
ghetto. He committed suicide in 1960, just as the civil rights movement
was beginning to sweep the South.

The case had mixed results for the NAACP, Boyle said. Despite its legal
victory, the organization was not successful in stopping the spread of
housing segregation. But fundraising for this case did spur the creation
of the NAACP’s influential Legal Defense Fund, which would later
be used in many critical cases, including Brown vs. Board of Education.

While it would be easy to see Sweet as a civil rights hero, Boyle said
that wasn’t the doctor’s aim.

“Dr. Sweet wasn’t a crusader. He didn’t want to battle
for his race. The simple truth was that he found a house he could buy
and he wanted to move in. There was nothing deep and complicated about
it.”

By the same token, it isn’t easy to pigeonhole Sweet’s white
neighbors who were so opposed to him and his family moving in, Boyle said.

While their actions were undeniably racist, they were not members of
the Ku Klux Klan and they were not driven solely by hate. The neighbors,
most of whom were working class or lower-end white-collar workers, struggled
financially to meet their mortgages. There was a real threat that their
property values would decline dramatically if a black family moved into
the neighborhood.

“They were scared for a lot of racist reasons and economic reasons
that got all tangled up together,” he said. “If we make them
into Klansmen – which they were not – it is too easy to dismiss
them. But they were ordinary people, and that’s what makes this
story even more poignant.”

And the fact that housing segregation would continue and even grow in
the United States for years, despite the legal and public relations victory,
meant that there wasn’t a happy ending for anyone, Boyle said. In
fact, he points out, the 2000 U.S. Census showed Detroit is still the
second-most segregated city in the country, right behind Milwaukee.

“The problem that black leaders highlighted with the Sweet case
in 1925 is still with us today,” Boyle said.

“Housing segregation is so common today that it may almost seem
natural to many people. But it wasn’t always that way. There was
a moment in time when segregation was created, and people fought against
it. And this story is about that moment in time.”